'Stinking Evidence' of Possible Fraud in Florida

'Stinking Evidence' of Possible
Election Fraud Found in Florida

A ''poll tape'' is the phrase
used to describe a printout from an optical scan voting
machine made the evening of an election, after the machine
has read all the ballots and crunched the numbers on its
internal computer. It shows the total results of the
election in that location. The printout is signed by the
polling officials present in that precinct/location, and
then submitted to the county elections office as the
official record of how the people in that particular
precinct had voted. (Usually each location has only one
single optical scanner/reader, and thus produces only one
poll tape.)

Bev Harris of www.blackboxvoting.org,
the erstwhile investigator of electronic voting machines,
along with people from Florida Fair Elections, showed up at
Florida's Volusia County Elections Office on the afternoon
of Tuesday, November 16, 2004, and asked to see, under a
public records request, each of the poll tapes for the 100+
optical scanners in the precincts in that county. The
elections workers - having been notified in advance of her
request - handed her a set of printouts, oddly dated
November 15 and lacking signatures.

Bev pointed out
that the printouts given her were not the original poll
tapes and had no signatures, and thus were not what she'd
requested. Obligingly, they told her that the originals were
held in another location, the Elections Office's Warehouse,
and that since it was the end of the day they should meet
Bev the following morning to show them to her.

Bev
showed up bright and early the morning of Wednesday the 17th
- well before the scheduled meeting - and discovered three
of the elections officials in the Elections Warehouse
standing over a table covered with what looked like poll
tapes. When they saw Bev and her friends, Bev told me in a
telephone interview less than an hour later, "They
immediately shoved us out and slammed the door."

In
a way, that was a blessing, because it led to the stinking
evidence.

"On the porch was a garbage bag," Bev
said, "and so I looked in it and, and lo and behold, there
were public record tapes."

Thrown away. Discarded.
Waiting to be hauled off.

"It was technically
stinking, in fact," Bev added, "because what they had done
was to have thrown some of their polling tapes, which are
the official records of the election, into the garbage.
These were the ones signed by the poll workers. These are
something we had done an official public records request
for."

When the elections officials inside realized
that the people outside were going through the trash, they
called the police and one came out to challenge Bev.

Kathleen Wynne, a www.blackboxvoting.org investigator, was
there.

"We caught the whole thing on videotape," she
said. "I don't think you'll ever see anything like this -
Bev Harris having a tug of war with an election worker over
a bag of garbage, and he held onto it and she pulled on it,
and it split right open, spilling out those poll tapes. They
were throwing away our democracy, and Bev wasn't going to
let them do it."

As I was interviewing Bev just
moments after the tussle, she had to get off the phone,
because, "Two police cars just showed up."

She told
me later in the day, in an on-air interview, that when the
police arrived, "We all had a vigorous debate on the merits
of my public records request."

The outcome of that
debate was that they all went from the Elections Warehouse
back to the Elections Office, to compare the original,
November 2 dated and signed poll tapes with the November 15
printouts the Elections Office had submitted to the
Secretary of State. A camera crew from www.votergate.tv met
them there, as well.

And then things got even
odder.

"We were sitting there comparing the real
[signed, original] tapes with the [later printout] ones that
were given us," Bev said, "and finding things missing and
finding things not matching, when one of the elections
employees took a bin full of things that looked like garbage
- that looked like polling tapes, actually - and passed by
and disappeared out the back of the building."

"And I must tell you," Bev said, "that
whatever they had taken out [the back door] just came right
back in the front door and we said, 'What are these polling
place tapes doing in your dumpster?'"

A November 18
call to the Volusia County Elections Office found that
Elections Supervisor Deanie Lowe was unavailable and nobody
was willing to speak on the record with an out-of-state
reporter. However, The Daytona Beach News (in Volusia
County), in a November 17th article by staff writer
Christine Girardin, noted, "Harris went to the Department of
Elections' warehouse on State Road 44 in DeLand on Tuesday
to inspect original Nov. 2 polling place tapes, after being
given a set of reprints dated Nov. 15. While there, Harris
saw Nov. 2 polling place tapes in a garbage bag, heightening
her concern about the integrity of voting records."

The Daytona Beach News further noted that, "[Elections
Supervisor] Lowe confirmed Wednesday some backup copies of
tapes from the Nov. 2 election were destined for the
shredder," but pointed out that, according to Lowe, that was
simply because there were two sets of tapes produced on
election night, each signed. "One tape is delivered in one
car along with the ballots and a memory card," the News
reported. "The backup tape is delivered to the elections
office in a second car."

Suggesting that duplicates
don't need to be kept, Lowe claims that Harris didn't want
to hear an explanation of why some signed poll tapes would
be in the garbage. "She's not wanting to listen to an
explanation," Lowe told the News of Harris. "She has her own
ideas."

But the Ollie North action in two locations
on two days was only half of the surprise that awaited Bev
and her associates. When they compared the discarded,
signed, original tapes with the recent printouts submitted
to the state and used to tabulate the Florida election
winners, Harris says a disturbing pattern emerged.

"The difference was hundreds of votes in each of the
different places we examined," said Bev, "and most of those
were in minority areas."

When I asked Bev if the
errors they were finding in precinct after precinct were
random, as one would expect from technical, clerical, or
computer errors, she became uncomfortable.

"You have
to understand that we are non-partisan," she said. "We're
not trying to change the outcome of an election, just to
find out if there was any voting fraud."

That said,
Bev added: "The pattern was very clear. The anomalies
favored George W. Bush. Every single time."

Of
course finding possible voting "anomalies" in one Florida
county doesn't mean they'll show up in all counties. It's
even conceivable there are innocent explanations for both
the mismatched counts and trashed original records; this
story undoubtedly will continue to play out. And, unless
further investigation demonstrates a pervasive and statewide
trend toward "anomalous" election results in many of
Florida's counties, odds are none of this will change the
outcome of the election (which exit polls showed John Kerry
winning in Florida).

Nonetheless, Bev and her merry
band are off to hit another county.

As she told me
on her cell phone while driving toward their next
destination, "We just put Volusia County and their lawyers
on notice that they need to continue to keep a number of
documents under seal, including all of the memory cards to
the ballot boxes, and all of the signed poll tapes."

Why?

"Simple," she said. "Because we found anomalies
indicative of fraud."

*************

Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project
Censored Award-winning best-selling author and host of a
nationally syndicated daily progressive talk show. www.thomhartmann.com
His most recent books are "The Last Hours of Ancient
Sunlight," "Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate
Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights," "We The People: A
Call To Take Back America," and "What Would Jefferson Do?: A
Return To Democracy."

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